Angle(s)

Saturday, May 4, 2013

David Lynch's musical magic

David Lynch deploys music in his movies to devastating effect. Ahead of a retrospective, we pick his best statements in sound

Lynch mob … The director with the Hollywood High School Sheiks marching band in 2006. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Reuters

David Lynch once said: "Sound is almost like a drug. It's so pure that when it goes in your ears, it instantly does something to you." With the exception of perhaps Quentin Tarantino, no one has repurposed music with greater effect in film than Lynch. And so, in light of his forthcoming BFI retrospective, here are some of his greatest musical moments.

The open-ended narrative of Mulholland Drive, coupled with Lynch's surreal technique, lends this movie a hallucinatory quality. It makes this scene even more jarring because Lynch's use of music is so beautiful. At a pivotal point in the film, lovers Betty and Rita visit the ghostly, near-empty Club Silencio. A performer announces "No hay bander": there is no band. And yet we hear one. Then Rebekah Del Rio performs her Spanish, a cappella version of Roy Orbison's Crying (renamed Llorando). I have watched this film more times than I'd ever care to admit but Del Rio's voice, a cloudburst of emotion, always knocks the wind out of me. Any further description of what happens would spoil it for those (shame on you) who haven't seen it.

A suffocating mystery set in the murky underbelly of small-town America, Blue Velvet won Lynch his second best director Academy Award nomination. It also resurrected Dennis Hopper's career with his role as gas-huffing psychopath Frank Booth. Teenage bloodhound Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLaughlin) gets in way over his head when Frank takes him for a wild joyride to the house of Ben, his drug dealer. There, Ben lip-syncs Orbison's gorgeous croon-fest In Dreams into an electric light, sending Frank into emotional meltdown. It prompts one of the most petrifying scenes in the film …

Composed by long-term Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, the song Falling became the theme for the TV series. It was a sensation, and won a Grammy for best pop instrumental. Playing through the opening credits, even without Julee Cruise's airy vocals (a huge influence on a generation of shoegazey female singers) the music, despite its simplicity, is eerily provocative and ever-so-slightly foreboding.

Dorothy Vallens's (Isabella Rossellini) nightclub performance of Bobby Vinton's hazy, lusty Blue Velvet is one of the film's most famous scenes. Heavy-eyed, with her buttermilk skin and plum-like mouth, Dorothy pulls the captivated Jeffrey Beaumont irretrievably into her dark world, with Laura Dern sitting dorkily beside him. Some geeky trivia: Lynch initially enlisted Badalamenti's help as a vocal coach for Rossellini in Blue Velvet, and he plays piano in this scene.

This is an electrifying scene. We watch as mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) first sets eyes on Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette) as she gets out of one car and into another. It's simple enough. But in slowing the film right down and using a delicate strobe light on Arquette's face, the atmosphere in that garage, carried expertly by Lou Reed's languorous vocals and that pretty guitar riff, is clotted with lust. Getty's reaction is brilliant: his eyes do all the stuttering his lips would if he could talk.

Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are lovers on the run in Wild at Heart, which is a semi-homage to Elvis's acting career, without actually saying his name once in the film. Cage breaks into song in two scenes and his version of Love Fool, crooned sweatily at Lula after he's beaten the shit out of a kid in a bar fight, is the best. Even if he does sound – as a friend who I watched this with once said – like he's got a piece of dim sum stuck in his throat.

A charming woman with tumor cheeks (The Lady in the Radiator) appears in visions, usually singing, to Henry Spencer (Jack Nance). This is the most famous of those performances and the first big Lynchian musical moment. You need a thesis to dissect the scene, but it's basically a woman who lives in a dank radiator singing creepily about how "in heaven, everything is fine". Pixies famously covered the song, with Frank Black's guttural screaming adding more menace.